Zhanhong Liao’s most recent exhibition at Pulchri Studio in The Hague, Brought together an ambitious series of mixed media works on canvas. Her Textured collages build shifting surfaces that suggest the ancient and rich textiles and designs of her native China, while also incorporating images culled from Western culture, including printed texts and advertisements. In some works the two cultures are fragmented and juxtaposed in subtle ways as the artist tries to discover how to attain wholeness, how to trust to the future and reconcile the past. As the American poet, Mark Strand wrote: ‘We all have reasons for moving I move to keep things whole.’

Liao’s history of the past two years living in China and the previous twelve in the Netherlands powerfully informs her work. In her often brightly shimmering works, Liao is working out how to stay, whether to go - allowing the shifting layers of who she is, melt, harden and reform in the layers of paint, photographs and torn paper. Often the tones and blocks of colour recall the work of Paul Klee. In one painting, pale with tentativeness, she invents her own ideogrammatic language of tiny symbols as if to return to a less conflicted mark-making beyond the two alphabets she moves between. It’s in this moving between that she creates a delicate, Yet determined visual language that teaches her - and us - how to make a new knowledge to live by.

Cherry Smyth
Critic for Art Monthly, London and Circa, Dublin
2006


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